Objective Physical activity trials are being published more often, but reports may not include randomized clinical trial reporting guideline items. We aimed to describe the completeness of guideline-recommended reporting in randomized clinical trials of supervised or unsupervised physical activity interventions.

Design We conducted MEDLINE searches to identify RCTs published in 5 leading journals in sports and exercise medicine (British Journal of Sports Medicine, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, Journal of Applied Physiology, and International Journal of Sports Medicine) between January 2006 and December 2016. Eligible studies were primary reports having at least 1 intervention arm comprising structured physical activity (eg, tailored exercise programs) or unstructured physical activity programs (eg, general exercise recommendations). We excluded studies using a physical activity intervention arm as a comparator for a nonphysical activity active intervention. For each publication, 2 assessors independently reviewed full texts and abstracted data based on 9 items selected from Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) guidelines. The 9 items were chosen based on their applicability to physical activity trials and their relevance to readers (eg, title identification) and researchers (eg, numbers analyzed). Our review is ongoing; the findings reported here derive from a 25% random sample of retrieved articles for each journal.

Funding/Support: Daniel Umpierre receives research productivity grants from the National Council on Technology and Scientific Development (CNPq, Brazil). Patrícia Martins Bock receives postdoctoral scholarship from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Level Personnel (Capes). The other authors report no disclosures.

Role of the Funder/Sponsor: The sponsors of the study had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report.

Additional Information: Datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/dumpierre/exsc-reporting.git